To understand why this is happening, you have to go back in history to the end of the slave trade. When the ability to kidnap people from Africa and bring them back to enslave them was legally ended, the white enslavers realized that the only way they could keep slavery going was to force people to breed more slaves. Google that history. It is utterly abhorrent but necessary to understand where the Republican Party is coming from today.

Since the end of slavery, a certain contingent in the U.S. has never gotten over the fact that they couldn’t legally have a sub-class of citizens that they could use for free or nearly-free labor. So they kept trying to find other ways to keep people oppressed, and they expanded that oppression beyond just black people and to any of the “less desirable” groups. Think not just Black people, but also Irish, immigrants, Appalachia. They pit these groups against one another because divided people are easier to control. But the goal is the same - have large groups of people poor for generations who have no other option but to work for slave wages and keep the people at the top very, very rich.

Slavery in the U.S. was a huge economic force, one that a certain contingent (the very wealthy) never got over losing. The next best thing was to create whole groups of people who are desperate enough to work for almost nothing. That’s what we have in this country now. And it works best if those people are constantly putting out more children. That keeps them even more stuck and more desperate, and it keeps a steady supply of cheap labor coming.

It’s no coincidence that they want abortion ended but also want to ensure those same people are continually subjected to sub-standard education, that those same people are “allowed” to send their kids to work (defeating years of progress through child labor laws), that those people are also unable to access higher education, government benefits, or virtually anything that could potentially make their lives better.

I don’t recall the specifics of the one article I read about this, but yes, I think being able to declare bankruptcy gives an out for at least some of the debt. I believe there was also some way that doing so protected Tesla but can’t recall exactly how that worked.

This just doesn’t seem like a “he’s just bad at running a company” situation. A company of Twitter’s age and maturity could have run itself for quite some time if Elon just let it continue on. He’s doing this intentionally for some self-serving reason.

IIRC, causing its value to plummet is the easiest way for him to get out of this whole fiasco via bankruptcy (remember, he was basically forced into buying it). He played a stupid game and won a stupid prize and now he’s desperately trying to find a way out.

This only makes sense when you understand that he’s intentionally trying to destroy Twitter.

Given how much they have lied about already and the crap Huffman has pulled in the past, I would not doubt it in the least. I am sure they are doing all sorts of mind-games crap like this to try and keep users from fleeing. They have to be freaking out right about now.

All I can do as a user is take my content and time elsewhere. Which is why I’m here. Hoping that like has happened on mastodon, we will slowly move past the “Reddit news” phase and just transition into people contributing to communities and building apps for Lemmy/Kbin.

Reddit is only valuable because of the content users provide. If you don’t post valuable content, the site is worthless. Reddit can force subs back open, but they can’t force users to submit the content that makes the site valuable to begin with.